Twitter and the Collective Mind

During the recent “Hope for Haiti Now” event, my wife and I watched the concert and kept asking the question, “Who is that performing?”After a couple of random guesses, I handed her my phone and fired up Twitter.

As expected the top trend was “Hope for Haiti Now” and people were tweeting comments about the performers. Sometimes people would name the wrong person, but overall, the crowd answered the question within seconds of the next performance starting.

That was a global event and the collective mind was hard at work. But that collective mind happens all of the time: you can learn from it or you can ignore it. As a business owner, I’m more inclined to try to find a competitive advantage using this resource.

And after using the collective mind that is Twitter, I’ve used it to prototype a new variety of my service, which I’ll be announcing mid-February.

(Shameless plug) But if you want some insight how you can use Twitter for business, please consider registering for the “What in the Heck is Twitter?” workshop on February 16, 2010 at 8:30a.